The Ministry of the Spirit: Selected Writings of Roland Allen

Roland Allen is renowned for his original solutions to dilemmas about mission. His principal works were written in the opening decades of the twentieth century, yet his radical ideas still resound in today’s church. The Ministry of the Spirit brings together some of his shorter pieces which have long been unavailable, enabling today’s readers to delve deeper into Allen’s ideas. Among them are
Pentecost and the World,

Non-Professional Missionaries,

Mission Activities,
and an abbreviation of
The Case for Voluntary Clergy.
The writings collected in The Ministry of the Spirit sit with Allen’s better-known work and are no less penetrating and suggestive for the mission of the church. Allen’s fundamental belief in centrality of the work of the Holy Spirit to Church life shapes his conclusion. As Professor Lamin Sanneh says in his Foreword: it is ‘hard to believe that Allen first broached these ideas nearly a hundred years ago, for they are so redolent with contemporary meaning.’ Roland Allen’s experience as a missionary in North China led him to re-assess radically the missionary principles of the Western churches. His work, recognized as prophetic even in his own lifetime, has taken on a new significance in the third Christian millennium.